Thursday, 12 October, 2017 UTC

Summary

Most enterprise apps currently use relational databases like SQL, MariaDB, or MySQL due to their popularity and stable nature. However, developers face issues when they try to scale such databases. Furthermore, considering the recent breed of web applications that handle large data sets, developers are constantly looking for more scalable databases. This has attributed to the rise of non-relational (NoSQL) databases. One such database that has become really popular is MongoDB.

In this tutorial we will follow a step-by-step approach to create charts using data stored in a MongoDB database. We will use the PHP scripting language to connect to the database and fetch the data, which would then be used to render the chart.

We picked PHP over others as it comes with a MongoDB driver that connects it to the database. If you need to add more firepower to your web application, you can also use Node.js.

Requirements:

For creating charts using PHP and MongoDB, you need the following to be downloaded and installed on your system:

XAMPP

MongoDB

PHP driver for MongoDB

Composer

Part 1: Including Dependencies

To render FusionCharts in PHP using MongoDB, we need to include following dependencies:

FusionCharts Suite XT: To begin, you need to download the FusionCharts Suite XT package and store all the extracted script files in a new folder inside the project folder, as shown below.